Small group of young activists call for abolishing ICE

1of 5Demonstrators shout messages of protest directed at personnel in the ICE processing facility at 3523 Crosspoint in San Antonio on Tuesday. They’ve been camping at there for a week.Photo: Tom Reel /Staff photographer

2of 5Demonstrators shout messages of protest directed at personnel in the ICE processing facility at 3523 Crosspoint in San Antonio on Tuesday.Photo: Tom Reel /Staff photographer

3of 5Protesters have set up a tent outside of the ICE at 3523 Crosspoint in San Antonio, where they’ve been protesting for a week.Photo: Tom Reel /Staff photographer

One week ago, a small group of young activists planned a vigil outside of San Antonio’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on the North Side.

They never left.

Seven days later, the week-old group, called Occupy ICE, is still camping out in tents on the grass outside the facility.

They offer food and water to immigrants waiting in line outside the facility, they said, and every so often they hold “noise demos,” during which they make a racket to let the immigrants detained inside know they’re there, supporting them.

The goal, the activists said, is to run ICE out of San Antonio, and, eventually, get it abolished.

Bipartisan outrage over the Trump administration’s family separation practice, and then its difficulty in reuniting them once the practice was halted by an executive order, has put the nation’s immigration policy under scrutiny and led some prominent lawmakers to call for ICE’s elimination.

An arm of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE was founded in 2003 after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Among those outspoken in the mission to abolish ICE are New York’s 28-year-old Democratic primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and possible 2020 presidential contender Kirsten Gillebrand. U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., introduced a bill to end the agency.

But not all Democratic lawmakers agree on the issue.

“We will always have the need for some entity to enforce our immigration laws. The concern that I have about the calls to abolish ICE is that they really play into Donald Trump’s hands,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, said in a recent interview with the Express-News.

“The campaign is a little misdirected and probably benefits our opponents more than it benefits those we’re trying to help,” he said.

The activists, many of them students, wear sunglasses and handkerchiefs to conceal their identities. They go by made-up names, too. Some of them say it’s because they’re undocumented. Others say they don’t want to get harassed by the government or by conservative trolls online.

“We’re here today to protest ICE, to bring to light the inhumanity and indignity immigrants face on a daily basis,” said one San Antonio student who went by the name Tecolote.

That particular facility, located at 3523 Crosspoint — just off Wurzbach Parkway — is not quite 2 years old and has 20,500 square feet. It’s part of the Enforcement and Removal Operations Department, which identifies, arrests and deports immigrants.

Nina Pruneda, spokeswoman for ICE in Central and South Texas, said the processing facility is not involved in family reunification cases.

Much like the Department of Homeland Security vans that have been transporting the recently reunited immigrants, the building is utterly nondescript, with no signage on its front to signify its purpose. The building exists behind trees and between large, vacant parking lots along a winding road. The only thing that gives it away are the two flags beside it: an American flag and a blue DHS one.

“A lot of people think ICE is something faraway, something unseen.,” Tecolote said. “We’re here to show ICE is under our very noses.”

Silvia was born and mostly raised in Galesburg, Illinois. After high school she took a gap year and spent it in Mexico before pursuing her bachelor’s in English at Grinnell College.

She interned at Minnesota Public Radio and wrote in English and Spanish for the bilingual, Chicago-based newspaper Extra News. In 2015, she won the two-year Hearst Journalism Fellowship and moved to Connecticut to report for Greenwich Time, the Connecticut Post and the Norwalk Hour.

One year later, she moved to Texas to cover education for the San Antonio Express-News, where she now covers immigration. She has also been the lead reporter following the Sutherland Springs community in the wake of the November 2017 church massacre.

She loves breakfast tacos, frequently uses “y’all” in her vocabulary and always has a stash of cascarones at her desk, so it’s safe to say she’s fully embraced the San Antonio way.